Time passed and eventually, I realized that I had to address this issue more seriously.
Thus, I collected some statistics on the number of problem messages that we in Oracle support had to handle and I wrote an email to our SAP-internal contact for the Oracle platform.

The Promise

After some discussions, I was promised to get a new, enhanced error message text for the specific problem, but very likely not earlier than in Oracle 12…
That all happened back in July 2009…

Now, (closing the semantic circle that started in the first lines of this post) I had to present this problem to my colleagues during the workshop so that they would know what to do in case a customer comes up with this kind of problem.
Imagine me, gasping for air, when I found that with Oracle 10.2.0.5 I wasn’t able to reproduce the bad error message text anymore.

Signs and wonders

Instead, when starting up my database instance after a simulated crash during an online backup, this was the text we got:

"ORA-01113: file 1 needs media recovery if it was restored from backup, or END BACKUP if it was not
ORA-01110: data file 1: 'F:ORACLETDBSAPDATA1SYSTEM01.ORA'"

YES!
No more unnecessary restore/recovery actions.
No more supercritical priority very high messages, just because of a power outage during a backup run.

This really is a change for the better and it shows the possible impact we as customers and supporters can have even with a widely used “standard” product like the Oracle RDBMS.

So, THANK YOU Oracle!
This really brightened my day (although I wasn’t able to demo the bad error message during the workshop …).